The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald · first published 1920
24% recommend61% neutral14% critical
Why HN recommends it
A short, tightly constructed novel about the American Dream, wealth and class. The prose is widely regarded as pure art. Worth rereading as an adult if it was assigned in school, and a quick read in one sitting.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.... It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again." It is the st
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…that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before,…
on “Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?” ↗…Small Gods - Terry Pratchett. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. The Guide - R. K. Narayan. Evidence - Mary Oliver. All of Us - The Collected Poetry of Raymond Carver. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Murakami Haruki. This and the next four are odd choices, perhaps, since it's a surrealist book, but IMO books that force your imagination to work hard…
on “Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?” ↗I’ve just read Tender is the Night, and while I didn’t love it like I loved The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald knocks it out of the park with “poignant observational value”. “Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking…
on “Why Do We Keep Reading the Great Gatsby?” ↗Two of my favourite summer books: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland Any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine.
on “Ask HN: Summer Reading Recommendations?” ↗> The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald I read Gatsby and came away with two thoughts: 1. How incredibly well constructed. Almost every paragraph weaves a story together that starts off slow and then accelerates incredibly…
on “Ask HN: Summer Reading Recommendations?” ↗…century Russians from Gogol to Chekhov are pretty much can't-lose. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is beautiful and captures the spirit of youth. Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a short masterpiece. The Great Gatsby is as good as its reputation says. Read Dickens if you want the essence of the English language and the English character. Read Kafka for the strangest articulation of modernity. Bruno Schulz is more…
on “Ask HN: What are some good books?” ↗…Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It. Emma and Pride and Prejudice. Iliad, Odyssey and first half of the Aeneid. A Room With A View and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Great Gatsby, Call of the Wild and Age of Innocence. War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Don Quixote.
on “Ask HN: What are some must read books?” ↗…Dos Passos, John - 42nd Parallel, The Edwards, Frank - Strange People Elliot, T.S. - Waste Land, The Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying Figes, Orlando - A People’s Tragedy Fitzgerald, F. Scott - Great Gatsby, The Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary Friedrich, Otto - Before The Deluge Gillete, Charlie - Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll, The Ginzburg, Eugenia - Journey Into The Whirlwind Guralnick,…
on “David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013)” ↗Confessions of an Economic Hitman, The Wealth of Nations, The Great Gatsby, See No Evil, Hannibal
on “Ask YC: favorite books” ↗…Thomas Pynchon The Life of Pi by Yann Martel the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but very enjoyable) Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe Shogun by James Clavell Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that…
on “Ask YC: favorite books” ↗Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey Nonfiction: Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager (1993) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (history)
on “Ask HN: What to read during the holidays?” ↗1. The Count of Monte Cristo 2. The Great Gatsby And yet I read mostly non-fiction... :) It's hard to say these are my absolute top two (that's probably an eight-way tie in reality), but Gatsby definitely hit me at a pivotal time and became a subtle…
on “Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.” ↗…Roberts - *To Kill a Mockingbird* by Harper Lee - Anything by Nikolai Gogol - Short stories by Guy de Maupassant - Most of John Steinbeck's works - *Lord of the Flies* by William Golding - *The Great Gatsby* F. Scott Fitzgerald Also, if you're reading Kafka, In the Penal Colony is a short story I enjoyed that I don't see mentioned much.
on “Ask HN: classic literature recommendations?” ↗I'm a little partial to The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes as though painting through the forrest with a brush made of wind. I've never seen the movie, and I don't intend to; the writing in this book takes the imagination on a ride…
on “Ask HN: What are some great fiction reads for someone that reads non-fiction” ↗…much of it in anything but an extremely deep reading of English lit) and to read short, relatively easy "literary" works that are more recent. Vonnegut's way at the easy end. Maybe try Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or his short stories? Salinger's Nine Stories? I'm not sure—at this point I have trouble judging what's approachable. I'd make a terrible teacher of literature. Lots of things kinda work this way. Jazz…
on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?” ↗